World’s first Malaria vaccine cost about ₦2,600 per child.

GlaxoSmithKline has found a malaria vaccine to protect against malaria. And this World’s first Malaria vaccine is to cost about ₦2,600 per child.

This vaccine has taken 30 years of research and several hundred million pounds (much of it from the Gates Foundation) but the vaccine, Mosquirix, has been approved by the European Medicines Agency.

This new vaccine is the world’s first vaccine against any parasite – it’s not just the world’s first vaccine against malaria. It’s never been done before. The ideal vaccine is one shot and provides life-long, high levels of protection. And this could save between 150,000 and 300,000 babies from dying a year.

Malaria is caused by a parasite called plasmodium, whereby the mosquito injects people with this parasite. It’s not a virus or bacteria. Malaria killed half a million children in sub-Saharan Africa in 2013 – most of them under the age of five.

198m people are thought to have contracted malaria in 2013 (source: WHO)

584,000 are thought to have died from the disease in the same year (source: WHO)

The World Health Organisation will decide whether to recommend the vaccine by the end of the year. It will then be up to individual governments to decide whether to buy it.

Sir Andrew Witty the boss of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) told ITV it will be priced at around £8.50 a child ( ₦2,600), as long as there is enough demand for it to be mass-produced which is said to be around 100 million doses.